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Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral

A Note

For the last several years I have been working on a translation of the Chilean poet and Nobel Prize winner Gabriela Mistral. (She was about a half-generation older than Pablo Neruda, and I think he learned a great deal from her.) Her Nobel was the first ever given to a South American writer.

What translations there are of Mistral are not easy to find, and many of her most powerful poems have never been put into English. The University of New Mexico Press published it in September, 2003.

I fell in love with Mistral when I first read her, and the love only grows deeper as I work with her words and try to understand and to reflect her passion and her art. Here are three of her poems and my versions.

 Ursula K. Le Guin

Excerpt from Ursula K. Le Guin's translation of the poems of Gabriela Mistral